THE GOOD DOCTOR HAD HIS PROBLEMS: WHAT WE CANNOT IGNORE ABOUT MANMOHAN SINGH
Hartosh Singh Bal
The death of Manmohan Singh in December 2024 prompted a reassessment of a man who had faced heavy criticism from his political opponents towards the end of his second term as prime minister. Much of this can be put down to the usual tendency people have of not wanting to speak ill of the dead, but some of it also seems genuine and heartfelt. Certainly, the events that Singh set in motion, first as finance minister and then as prime minister, marked some of the most consequential changes the Indian polity has seen since Jawaharlal Nehru’s tenure.
However, implicit in many of these accounts of his achievements is the idea that money, finance and the economy determine the fate of a society. But these are not its only determinants. An assessment of Singh cannot stop with what liberalisation delivered, it must also include what it could have delivered—not just what Singh did, and but also what he failed to do.
Post-Nehruvian India has been shaped by the misdeeds of Indira Gandhi. It would be misplaced to read the Emergency as an aberration. The measures were a sign of Indira’s personality, one marked by an insecure authoritarianism. The path from the 1971 victory against Pakistan to the 1975 tyranny against her own citizens was filled with a series of grave errors. Indira’s return to power in 1980 turned out to be even more disastrous. She swung rightwards in her outlook but there remained a continuity in her desire to cling to power by any means possible. The events she set in motion during this period are still playing out, even after the rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Narendra Modi.
Challenged in the Emergency by the Akalis, Indira’s response was to try and outflank them on the religious front. Nehru’s response to the Akalis had been Partap Singh Kairon, a US-educated moderniser and the only leader Punjab has had since Independence with any vision of a future. Indira’s response was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a seminary-educated preacher with a pre-modern version of faith, who was looking to push back Punjab into a past of his imagination.
Bhindranwale was not Indira’s creation, but each used the other until the culmination of the ill-planned and disastrously executed Operation Blue Star. Indira’s subsequent assassination saw the Congress, under her son Rajiv Gandhi, orchestrate one of the bloodiest religious massacres in India since Partition. In less than a week, largely Hindu mobs, often led by Congress men, killed thousands of Sikhs across the country, close to three thousand in the national capital alone.
Rajiv took her dalliance with a politics of religion to new heights. The elections after the massacres saw the Congress initiate the defining feature of Indian politics to this day—using the fear of a minority, in this case Sikh, to consolidate the votes of the Hindu majority. Political Hindutva was born here, with the Congress delivering exactly what the RSS had always desired—a Hindu vote-bank. It was no wonder, then, that the RSS backed the Congress during these elections.
No other term of any Indian prime minister can compare with the dangerous and opportunistic games Rajiv played—opening the doors of the Babri Masjid, overturning the Shah Bano verdict, rigging the Kashmir elections—derailing much of worth that had been achieved since 1947. The BJP built on these disasters, inciting bigotry and hatred through its rath yatras across the country.
Rajiv’s response to the BJP’s heightening of the politics of religion, helped by men such as his cousin Arun Nehru, was to do exactly what his mother had sought to do—to try and outdo the Hindu Right through even more radical positions. All this while, he ignored another set of forces playing out around him, ones that the Congress should have naturally backed and supported—the revolution for equity in what had been the world’s most iniquitous society for over a millennium.
The rise of Kanshi Ram and the Bahujan Samaj Party, as well as the coming to power of leaders such as Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh, held out lessons that remain lost to the Congress to this day. The Constitutional safeguards and guarantees that men like BR Ambedkar had ensured, even when tardily implemented, did more for equity in Indian society in less than fifty years than the entire thousand years that preceded them. Yet, the next steps on these lines, such as the Mandal Commission reforms, took place outside the Savarna-dominated leadership of the Congress, the Marxist Left and the Bharatiya Janata Party.
It was against this backdrop that Singh entered the political scene, when the Indian government was faced with a balance-of-payments crisis. The liberalisation of the Indian economy that he and former prime minister Narasimha Rao engineered also triggered a predictable consequence: as the role of government shrank, the safeguards and reservations that had allowed for the stirrings of equity in Indian society became less meaningful in an expanding private sector, which had no room for these ideas.
This was not a burden Singh could remedy under Rao, but he had the power to do so in his ten years as prime minister. What seems particularly galling today is that of all of India’s leaders in the past fifty years, Singh was the one who seemed the most aware of the problem. In 2004, speaking in Mumbai, at a time when prime ministers still held press conferences, he said reservation in the private sector was “an idea whose time had come.” He had used exactly the same phrase while ushering in liberalisation, but what was a call to action then was no more than lip service 13 years later.
Time and again during his tenure, corporates and industry bodies committed to voluntarily taking action on the issue and he took them at face value. It was not as if he did not have the good will or political capital to implement this decision—the Indo-US nuclear deal, for instance, was far less palatable a cause when Singh staked his future on it. At the time, and even more so in retrospect, the deal, with its reformulation of Indo-US relations, was an idea that simply did not bear comparison with the consequences of what reservation in the private sector would have meant.
The greatest beneficiaries of liberalisation have been the Hindu Savarna. It is no coincidence that inequality in Indian society has continually risen since the early 1980s, drastically spiking post-liberalisation. The national-wealth share of the richest one percent of the population was under fifteen percent in 1982, but was close to forty percent in 2023. The bottom 50 percent, which held a mere 11 percent share of the national wealth in 1982, saw it decline further to six percent.
Trotting out absolute numbers while pointing to the increase in the middle class—a misnomer for what is really the lesser-rich class in India—escapes the reality of what could have happened. The failure to push for reservation in the private sector was not simply a question of economic deprivation; it was a new exclusion from power.
The Savarna, despite their own enrichment, abandoned the Congress precisely to forestall any such possibility of greater empowerment. The upper-caste response to the upsurge from below, coming from Kanshi Ram and the pro-Mandal movement, was to increasingly move towards the BJP. The RSS ideology, of directing hatred outside the Hindu fold, was a means of ensuring that the churning from within was contained. Bigotry was also a convenient means of retaining the varna hierarchy.
If the Congress under Singh had dared to extend reservations to the private sector, it would have been far better placed to deal with the Savarna abdication of its party. Today, the even-greater control of resources by the Hindu upper-castes has ensured, through the BJP, that their hold over Indian society is stronger than ever. So much so that the Congress under Rahul Gandhi, who claims himself to be a champion of equity, does not even mention reservation in the private sector in his rhetoric about the caste census.
This failure of empowerment went hand in hand with Singh’s failure to deliver on the quest for justice—both for the 1984 massacre of Sikhs, perpetrated by Hindu mobs led by Congressmen, and the 2002 massacre of Muslims by Hindu mobs led by BJP and Sangh leaders. Too much has been made of an apology Singh offered on behalf of the government to the Sikh community in 2005, largely by Hindu liberals seeking to shield the Congress.
Consider the circumstances in which the apology was offered. It was in the course of a debate in the Rajya Sabha, on the government’s Action Taken report with respect to the findings of the Nanavati Commission. As The Caravan reported, the commission, led by former Supreme Court justice, GT Nanavati, failed to draw apparent conclusions from the evidence it had marshalled. It had indicted individual Congressmen, but stopped short of holding the Congress responsible as a whole. It is worth noting the same Nanavati was part of a similar panel looking into the 2002 violence, which reached similar conclusions through similar obfuscation, while exonerating Narendra Modi.
The tabling of the report had led opposition leaders to demand that the party take responsibility for the killings. Singh tendered the government apology under this pressure, at a moment when the Congress was under severe attack. But the party itself has never admitted to any wrongdoing nor shown any signs of remorse. I was present as a reporter for the Indian Express when Sonia Gandhi, accompanied by Singh, visited the Golden Temple complex in 1999. In Singh’s own recollection, they prayed, “God give us the strength, show us the way that such things never again take place in our country.”
This was the moment for an apology, but none was forthcoming—there was not even regret. In 2014, when Rahul repeatedly fumbled in his responses to questions by the anchor Arnab Goswami on the issue, he claimed that Sonia had expressed regret. After a detailed examination of the evidence, the journalist Karan Thapar concluded in a column: “Sonia Gandhi has expressed regret for Operation Bluestar and could be construed to have done so for the 1984 Sikh killings but it seems almost certain she hasn’t apologised for either.” Note the stress—even the regret had to be construed, and it has never been directly expressed by the party. And since then, men like Kamal Nath, named by eyewitnesses as having led mobs that killed Sikhs, were appointed chief ministers under Rahul. This does not reflect regret, but collusion.
Singh’s own stand on the 1984 massacres, before he was effectively coerced into an apology after the tabling of the report, speaks for itself. Campaigning for the Lok Sabha seat from Delhi in 1999, an election he later lost, Singh pointed out that “in 1984 he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan by the President of India. Had there been any institutionalised anti-Sikh bias in the Congress, which was then the ruling party, he would not have got the coveted award.”
An individual award of merit is hardly proof of the Congress’s institutional innocence in 1984. Through this campaign, Singh raised the issue of the RSS’s participation in the massacres. Clarifying his stand, he gave an interview where he stated, “Just as the Congress party did not plan the riots, but certain individuals belonging to the party have been accused of them, I have come to know that certain people belonging to the RSS were also named in some FIRs.”
Many Hindus, most of them liberals, have used such an equivalence to let the Congress off the hook, but Singh is the only Sikh of prominence to do so. He should have known better. Many from the RSS were involved in the violence, many were named in the FIRs, but leaders from the RSS did not head the mobs doing the killings. They did not organise the murderers, arm them or provide them with the anti-Sikh slogans that resonated in unison across Delhi. They did not have the wherewithal to get the Delhi police to disarm the Sikhs before they were killed. They did not fail to call the army. That was the Congress.
As far as 1984 goes, there is no question of equivalence between the Congress and the RSS. This aspect must be emphasised. While the burden of guilt for what the Congress did in 1984 does not lie with Manmohan Singh, he remains the party’s biggest shield, a platitude offered as consolation—“we made a Sikh the prime minister”—even though it is false. Singh was never made prime minister because he was Sikh, he just happened to be one. His choice is no proof, one way or another, of what the Congress did.
Institutionally, the vulnerability over 1984, which the Congress failed to address, also needs to be linked to its failure to close the circle of justice for the 2002 violence against Muslims in Gujarat, which was indeed perpetrated and abetted by the Sangh and the Modi-led government in Gujarat. The Congress under Singh was in power from 2004 to 2014, a period during which umpteen investigations into the violence went off track. One of these was the Central Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into the murder of former Gujarat home minister Haren Pandya, after he was said to have testified before an inquiry commission regarding a meeting where Modi allegedly directed the police to let the violence continue. The CBI concluded that the murder was carried out by several Muslim men, but its findings were thrown out by the Gujarat high court for shoddy investigation, and termed “botched up and blinkered.” At the very least, this spoke to the quality of people in the CBI—an institution under the jurisdiction of the union government—at the time. It is another matter that, after Modi came to power at the centre, the same findings were upheld by a Supreme Court bench that included Arun Mishra, who stands accused by senior advocate Dushyant Dave of being close to the party.
It requires an absurd understanding of history, society and events, to give Manmohan Singh credit for economic growth in India while absolving him of all that has gone wrong in the country. But whenever too much credit is given to the doctor, we need to remember that the decade of Modi was preceded by a decade of Manmohan. To believe this is a simple coincidence is to forego our ability to understand how political realities form.
Hartosh Singh Bal is the executive editor at The Caravan.
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